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Jeffrey Anderson is president of the American Main Street Initiative and served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021. He writes frequently for City Journal (see his columns here) and the Claremont Review of Books (see his essays here). I invited Jeff to take a look at the matters I take up in “Is it something I didn’t say?” regarding the pending federal consent decree that is to govern the Minneapolis Police Department for the foreseeable future. Responding to my request for comment, Jeff stepped back to place the consent decree in a relevant context. Jeff writes (below the break):

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Minneapolis’s murder rate would have been the envy of many American cities in 2018. It was 7.2 per 100,000 residents (see here and here). That was just 19 percent as high as New Orleans’s murder rate (37.1 per 100,000), 14 percent as high as Baltimore’s (51 per 100,000), and 12 percent as high as St. Louis’s (60.9 per 100,000). Minneapolis’s murder rate was also headed in the right direction, down 28 percent from 2017 and 6 percent from 2014.

Then the George Floyd incident occurred in May 2020 and in its aftermath Minneapolis decided that policing was optional. By 2021, Minneapolis had a murder rate of 22.1 per 100,000 residents — triple its rate from just three years earlier. Last year, Minneapolis’s murder rate was about 18 per 100,000 residents (76 homicides in a city with a population of about 425,000), higher than in 2023 and about 2 and 1/2 times as high as in 2018. Rather than asking the feds to help provide more DEI training, perhaps the city should focus on policing its streets.